My favorite part about Visual Basic was the help files. They were absolutely great for someone learning to code. From what I remember, there was a snippet of example code for basically everything.

This is how I learned to code. Ot was excellent. Its been very hard over the course of my career to learn other non basic languages, and I attribute it largely to those help files being so good that it became my first and main language.

Had the same experience. First language I learned was VB and felt like I had to learn programming all over again when moving on.

I learned basic first, then microcontroller ASM, which made C just kinda make sense when I went to it.

This video is pretty lengthy but well worth a watch; the oral history of Alan Cooper, the 'father of Visual Basic'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wtGFgaKYI0

EDIT: One highlight is where Alan Cooper gets a cease-and-desist letter from Microsoft for calling himself 'The Father of Visual Basic'...

https://youtu.be/-wtGFgaKYI0?t=9666

I absolutely love Visual Basic and am trying to make a Javascript version at appshare.co

This shows me that coding hasn't evolved at all over the last 30 years.

Visual Basic was one of the first languages I learned, and I was able to quickly make complex graphical applications.

I feel like we have regressed in a lot of ways.

Contrast building a GUI app in 1990 vs 2020.

Compare Visual Basic to something like React Native.

How much code would you have to write for some basic business application, like having a few screens that share a state, and interface with a database? How big would the executable be?

Visual Basic had some big flaws, but you could work around those flaws. And I can also explain the logic of a Visual Basic program fairly easily to someone inexperienced. And there is just so much less cognitive load involved. I feel like 90% of the actual code that I wrote was for actually processing data. Sure, asynchronous stuff could get difficult in VB, but that was the exception. And I wish that VB had had reducers.

I am certain that virtualizing the x86 Visual Basic 6 runtime in Javascript would easier to develop for and outperform many modern GUI frameworks today.

I do quite a bit of work in vb6 still. It is fast and easy to use. I really wish Microsoft would make vb7.

this is the comment that hits the nail on the head. Cognitive load.

I know well there are many good reasons to be on modern languages, but vb did make things easy.

The '90s were full of ballyhoo about object orientation and "soon we'll be bolting together software with off-the-shelf components."

Thanks to the failure to standardize C++ ABIs (among other reasons) that didn't happen... except for VBXs. You really could throw together a CRUD app pretty quickly with off-the-shelf VBX controls.